Archive for November, 2012

Salesforce.com just filed a disclosure with the US Securities and Exchange Commission showing that CEO Marc Benioff has just gotten a raise in his base salary for the company’s 2014 fiscal year. His new salary is $1.2 million a year, up from $1 million and includes a target cash bonus of as much as $1.8 million. Of course as is usually the case with these things, it’s not about the base salary, but the stock options. Salesforce’s board gave Benioff a grant to buy 375,000 Salesforce shares at a price of $156.37 a share, which was Salesforce’s closing price on the grant date of Nov. 27. The shares vest over four years. The option is granted on the assumption that the share price will rise, which it has been doing

Is Current TV entertaining a temping bid from Austin-based tech startup SocialGood.tv —a bid that would entail a move to Austin and a reworking of the network's core principles? No. It's on VentureBeat , the Austin Statesman , and The San Francisco Business Times , but it ain't happening, according to Current TV. "Complete poppycock," according to a spokeswoman for the network. Reached by phone, Stephen Vogelpohl, the startup's founder, said that his company was indeed looking at buying Current, which, to be fair, has had some notable ratings problems and is looking for partner organizations to stake it .

It’s hard to say how serious this is right now, but Yahoo was ordered to pay $2.7 billion in a lawsuit related to a breach of contract and lost profits of a yellow pages listing service by Worldwide Directories and Ideas Interactivas. In a statement and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo said it “believes the plaintiffs’ claims are without merit and will vigorously pursue all appeals.” We lobbed a call into Yahoo to get more details about the “non-final” judgment from the 49th Civil Court of the Federal District of Mexico City, but here is the company’s SEC filing: SEC-YHOO-1193125-12-487828

A swift scan of the week's top half-dozen releases reaffirms this axiom: When the big release is a Gerard Butler romantic comedy, a better time will be had in every other corner of the cineplex. Chief among the alternatives ought to be Killing Them Softly , which reunites star Brad Pitt with

A swift scan of the week's top half-dozen releases reaffirms this axiom: When the big release is a Gerard Butler romantic comedy, a better time will be had in every other corner of the cineplex. Chief among the alternatives ought to be Killing Them Softly , which reunites star Brad Pitt with

Broadcasters asked a Manhattan appeals court to shut down Barry Diller's service Aereo on Friday. The service, they say, is retransmitting its content without a license. The lawsuit has been ongoing since March; the plaintiffs are appealing judge Alison Nathan's denial of the same motion in July . Aereo's lawyers spent the morning in New York's Southern District Courthouse, arguing with plaintiff WNET over whether or not its service qualifies as retransmission or falls under the provisions made for offsite DVR playback offered by companies like Cablevision. The effect of Aereo's Web-based product is much the same as a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu (although without the time-delay): customers stream station broadcasts over the internet from a warehouse filled with antennas—its location unknown—that recieve the stations' signals and send it to users in New York who can't get station signals. Today, Aereo fleshed out its argument that it is, essentially, renting New Yorkers very long cords. WNET's lawyers argued the converse—that its broadcasts constituted public performance and were thus protected by copyright. The argument, while not part of the main trial, is central to Aereo's defense: it claims that each antenna constitutes an individual copy of the broadcast, and since the ratio of antennas to consumers is claimed to be 1, each consumer has his own personal copy, just as Cablevision kept an offsite warehouse filled with servers where each customer's DVR picks were stored. The company was sued by a huge consortium of major media companies and won the case on appeal in 2008; Judge Nathan cited the case during the original motion. The panel of three judges reviewing the case on Friday included Denny Chin, who ruled against Cablevision originally, as well as Christopher Droney and John Gleeson, who appeared to think that Aereo's business model itself indicated something suspicous

Organizational productivity app Evernote closed its latest round of financing on Friday, raising another $85 million in funding. Seventy-five percent of those funds are in the form of a secondary investment, the company said. The round was led by AGC Equity Partners/m8 Capital, as well as participation from Valiant Capital Partners and existing investors. The company raised $70 million in its last round , nearly a year and a half ago, bringing the total amount of funds raised to about a quarter of a billion dollars.

Google has acquired BufferBox, an e-commerce shopping locker start-up. BufferBox will continue to offer its service, which is currently free. One notable aspect of the acquisition is that it is only the second time Google has purchased a Google Ventures portfolio company. The previous such deal was for Milk, Kevin Rose’s mobile start-up. Rose is now a partner at Google Ventures, and he was the one who led the investment into BufferBox.

Sign up to be invited to our next conference or learn about future ones

About

Talk NYC/WW is your daily download of the tech, marketing and advertising news you need to know. It’s smartly curated to keep you up to speed on the innovators and innovations that are shaking up the digital world today.

GET TALK NYC VIA RSS

About Talk NYC

Talk NYC/WW is your daily download of the tech, marketing and advertising news you need to know. It’s smartly curated to keep you up to speed on the innovators and innovations that are shaking up the digital world today.